Ft. Hood shooter just as self-destructive as before

August 11, 2013|John Kass

An injured soldier is wheeled past pictures of slain soldiers and a civilian whom U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan has admitted to killing at Fort Hood in 2009. (Reuters) (Reuters)

"The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter," said U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, representing himself at his court-martial last week, discussing his role as the gunman at the 2009 Fort Hood massacre.

When the shooting was done, 14 Americans were dead and dozens more were wounded. Thirteen were his comrades, the 14th was an unborn child. He admits that he was the one with the gun.

It is obvious that the American-born Hasan, a self-described Islamic mujahedeen, views himself as something of a martyr. His legal advisers are now preparing an appeal, arguing that by his behavior he's clearly pushing for a death sentence.

He's already convicted himself from his own mouth. Before the trial, he allegedly told authorities that he began shooting his colleagues so they couldn't be sent to Afghanistan and harm the Taliban.

Witnesses said that as the shooting began, as his unarmed comrades began falling, Hasan began shouting "Allahu Akbar (God is Great)."

But the Army and the White House don't call this terrorism.

They call it workplace violence.

Because the Pentagon did not classify what happened as combat-related, the survivors cannot be awarded Purple Hearts, and some have been denied benefits as a result. Now lawyers are preparing civil cases after the court-martial.

"You have to remember that when this attack occurred, in November of 2009, there was a big fight about closing Guantanamo Bay," said Richard Rubenstein, a lawyer representing some of the survivors, in an interview on my WLS-AM radio program last week.

"So the politics and the optics from the administration's standpoint at that moment in time would not have been optimal for there to have been a mass terror attack, perpetrated by an American Muslim in the service," he said.

"They had a very strong political reason to, first of all, try and push this matter under the rug, and they were very successful for a number of years."

There are enough politics on all sides of the massacre to satisfy the political creatures who feed on such stuff.

The Democrats are once again being accused of allowing themselves to be paralyzed by political correctness. And it is true that President Barack Obama has walked delicately around this one.

But it's also true that the Republican Party establishment has for years been pushing war with Islam itself, rather than with Islamic terrorists. Some of their operatives have criticized Obama by sarcastically — and stupidly — repeating his middle name, Hussein, as if that makes him the enemy.

War with Islam might leave the U.S. all but isolated in the world, yet it's just the thing for feeding the massive domestic intelligence buildup and defense contractors who fill those GOP campaign coffers.

So liberal Democratic mouthpieces avoid the Fort Hood massacre as a political liability, and Republican mouthpieces trumpet Fort Hood as a sign of White House weakness.

Officially, the Pentagon considers what happened at Fort Hood to be workplace violence because calling it terrorism would allow Hasan to argue that he could not be given a fair trial.

"Parts of the government did call it terrorism, almost immediately," said Rubenstein, noting that the National Counterterrorism Center considered it as such early on, as did the State Department.

"But the Department of Defense did not. And the White House did not. And near as we can tell, the Department of Justice did not," he said.

For years before the shooting, Hasan exhibited danger signs. He made inappropriate remarks to his colleagues and to soldiers he counseled, expressing antipathy toward American justice and foreign policy. And shortly after the massacre, news broke that the government had years before intercepted several messages between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki.

Al-Awlaki was a radical anti-American cleric who was high on the White House terrorist hit list. He was eventually killed in a drone strike in Yemen.

In the email exchanges, Hasan repeatedly talked of martyrdom and meeting al-Awlaki in the afterlife. It should have been obvious that Hasan was a U.S. soldier by uniform only. His heart was with the enemy.

"The Army was aware of his beliefs as early as 2005, but they took no action against him," Rubenstein said. "They basically ignored performance standards that they had for doctors in his position because of his religion and his ethnicity. … He'd been repeatedly told by his superiors that the U.S. military wasn't the place for him, but he was getting a free education and he was getting paid, so he stayed."

Rather than run him off, the Army inexplicably ignored the warning signs, Rubenstein argues.

"The Army ignores his manifest failings as a physician, and his breach of his duties to his patients and his open and obvious jihadism, and the result is 13 soldiers dead, 14 people — one of the soldiers was pregnant — so if you count the baby it's 14. The baby counts," Rubenstein said.

The trial and testimony will continue. One witness talked of brushing away what she thought was red paint from a training paint-ball round. It wasn't paint, it was her own blood. Another witness testified that he played dead on the floor.

Hasan was born in the U.S. He was raised and educated and protected and promoted here. Yet it seems clear he's still not satisfied, and that there is one last thing he wants from America.